Week 7 Prompts/ 30 &31

30. Take a look at a photo of a person. What do you see?

31. Who's the first person you remember?

The young woman in the photo is my grandmother on my mothers’ side.  When I look at her picture, one of only few I have of my mothers’ side of the family, I am amazed and owed thinking that the picture was taken almost a hundred years ago.

I like the picture even though it does not match up to any of my memories of this woman who died when I was three years old, or maybe precisely because of that.

This elegant women, dressed according to the time latest fashion is beautiful and daring. The dark, rather formal overcoat is softened by the white lacy lapel, and it is at the same time somber but also festive. I like the white gloves and the hat, dress items not  often seen nowadays.    

But best of all I like this woman’s stature and bright eyes. She appears soft and confident at the same time.

She, beside my parents (and me) is the first person I remember. It’s a strange kind of memory based on my first three years of life. It is a limited collection of very few visuals, if any, combined with a vague notion of a person who was there and gone. More than anything it's a memory of a void sprinkled with some stories I heard later on but never completely manage to fill it up. It is also my first memory of death.

While a picture occupies only a tiny fraction of time  it can tell a whole story. If I had to choose I’ll pick this one of hers, in her late twenties, right after she left her hometown and married a man from another town. They settled in the big town, Vienna, and open their own business. I know from the stories that she was the mind behind the business operation.

I like this story more than the ones coming next of her struggle to survive during the war, the death of her husband (my grandfather) and her last years in Israel living, with no space of her own, in our tiny apartment. An old heavyset woman with a head cover, but that’s already from another picture.